


Richie Tozier: Cult Escapee

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Attempt at Humor, But I Was Sick of Staring at It, Humor, M/M, Not Sure How Funny This Is Honestly, Richie Tozier's Stand Up Act, So here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23168362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: Richie Tozier's back on another comedy tour with one important difference: he's married.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 21
Kudos: 229





	Richie Tozier: Cult Escapee

Whatever the audience is expecting from Richie, it probably isn’t for him to stride out on stage, grab the microphone, and announce, “Motherfuckers guess who got _hitched!_ _?_ ”

They are, however, more than willing to go along with it as Richie holds up his left hand, revealing the ring sitting pretty on his finger. The crowd goes nuts.

“Yeah, perfect, perfect, you’re all shiny and brand new, I can dump it all on you guys.” Richie gestures towards stage left, like there’s a group of people standing there. “My friends are all sick of hearing about it, which I think is very unfair of them seeing as four of them are sickeningly in love and also married, and the fifth has read all of the Harlequin romance novels.”

He holds up a hand. “I know, I know what you’re thinking, it’s Ben, but shockingly no, it is our favorite librarian.”

Anyone who’s been following Richie’s social media is pretty aware of the ‘Losers’ group by now. The shock of an award-winning architect, a famous fashion designer, a bestselling horror author, and a comedian who until 2016 could be best described as ‘Pete Davidson on crack’ and then in July of 2016 took a hard right turn into ‘John Mulaney’s dirtier gayer cousin’ all knowing each other and being childhood best friends still hasn’t completely worn off, but at least everyone’s on board with it now. Not surprisingly, actually, Stan’s the Twitter favorite. His savage, deadpan tweets have everyone swooning over their cell phones. Eddie’s a close second with his public roasting of Richie, although at first a few overzealous fans mistook him for a troll and went after him with metaphorical pitchforks.

Richie howled with laughter for _days_ over that.

So everyone knows Ben, and probably have an idea who Mike is even though Mike is hardly ever on Twitter and uses Instagram solely to post beautiful pictures of wherever he’s traveled to next (he once took a picture of a snail and tagged it ‘effervescent’ which caused Richie to nearly have a heart attack from pure joy).

“Ben is one of the gooey heart-eyed married ones,” Richie continues. “Mike was a librarian, so he had nothing better to do, apparently, and aside from the history books about our creepy small-town history it seems that the major thing the Derry library had going for it was the entire Harlequin romance collection. Which! Honestly! I knew it! I fucking knew it!

“Nobody among my friends believed me when I said that the librarians were secretly randy, none of them listened to me, but I knew! I knew, and sure enough, they were hoarding _The Slumdog Millionaire’s Baby Mama_ and _The Shockingly Racist Tale of the Sultan’s Harem_ the entire time!”

The crowd laughs and Richie waves his hand in an ‘eh whatever’ gesture. “The titles of those books are weird, man. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but oh boy, does Harlequin want you to. Most book titles just give you this little tease of what it could be about. Harlequin romance novels just spell it right out for you. _The Regency Rake’s Nanny,_ I mean that just tells you about everything you need to know, doesn’t it?

“Can you imagine if other books did that? Like, what if my friend Bill actually titled his books by what happens in them? We’d get titles like _The Obsessive Kidnapping Fan_ and _The Killer Alien Clown from Outer Space_.” Richie pauses. “Oh wait, they made that movie. Sorry. Let’s see… oh! _Seven Kids and the Sewer Orgy_.”

Half of the crowd roars in horrified and knowing laughter. The other half makes confused noises.

“If you don’t know what it is, don’t look it up.” Richie finds a camera and looks dead into it. “No, Bill, we’re never letting that go. Ever.” He looks back at the audience again. “It was his poor frazzled writer way of trying to say how close we all were as kids, or so he claims, but I think it was just that he realized we all had crushes on him as kids and he didn’t know how to cope. Can you imagine? You’re thirteen years old and you suddenly find you’re responsible for the emotional well-being of six other people? No wonder the guy had a fucking crisis and writes about serial killers. I had a fucking crisis and became a comedian, I’m an expert on this kind of thing.”

There are a few cheers that Richie waves off. “Not that everyone had a crush on me. No, that was Bill’s territory. Y’know I’m pretty sure he could’ve run a cult if he wanted to. One time, one time he told us all to cut our palms with this piece of glass he found in the dirt—without washing the piece of glass in between each cut, by the way—and swear a blood oath. A blood oath! And we did it no question! Bill could’ve told us to jump off a cliff and—oh wait! We did that too!” Richie smacks his forehead like he’s just remembered.

“Let’s see, God, what else did we do for that little turd. We went into the sewers and somehow avoided going into toxic shock. We went into an old abandoned house which didn’t collapse on us the first time, definitely collapsed on us the second time as adults because we didn’t learn shit the first time… we did this crazy chant while holding hands in a circle… we worshiped a turtle god at one point… yup! Yup! Bill ran a cult! We were in a cult!”

Richie spreads his arms wide. “Y’know, just a normal childhood doing normal things with your normal friends.

“But anyway, guys, _guys_. I got fuckin’ _married_. I asked my husband to marry me and he actually experienced a moment of stupidity and said yes. And then I married him as fast as I could before he came to his senses. He didn’t even make us do a prenuptial agreement! That’s true love, right there.”

Richie nods sagely and the crowd laughs. “What, don’t believe me? My husband is a risk analyst. It’s his job to prepare for the worst-case scenario. And he still said, ah, forget the agreement, we’re not going to get a divorce.” Richie fakes swooning and the crowd laughs again. “That is the most romantic fucking thing he’s ever said to me.

“I need to clarify—Eddie does say romantic things to me. They’re just not anything that anyone with any kind of sane bone in their body would think was romantic. Like this morning, he yelled at me for twenty minutes because I didn’t brush my teeth. And it was so fucking romantic, guys, I would’ve proposed to him all over again if I could.”

The crowd is cracking up, some in recognition because they’ve seen the tweets back and forth and know this is how Eddie and Richie roll, some in the delight of hearing new information, and some in a bit of confusion because how the fuck is that romantic?

Fortunately, Richie quickly explains. “I know, that sounds like the annoying ‘nagging wife’ trope in a bad sitcom—oh wait that’s most sitcoms—but Eddie is what I fondly like to call a paranoid cleanliness maniac. When he’s stressed? He cleans. When he can’t sleep? He cleans. We went back to our hometown for three days and he backed two bags that weighed more than he did and a toiletry bag. I’m pretty sure he held up a pharmacy to get all the stuff that was in his carry-on. The first time he blew me—”

And here Richie holds up a hand. “Don’t worry. I got permission to share this. Literal written permission because I didn’t believe that he wouldn’t deny it if I didn’t have it in writing. Hold on…”

He digs into his pocket and comes out with a napkin from Chili’s that says _fine you can tell the fucking blowjob story you piece of shit_ in chicken scratch writing. Richie holds it up proudly so that the cameras can zoom in on it. “Yup, that’s it, right there. We were having a group dinner at Chili’s. Yes, we eat at Chili’s. I’m sorry. I know that this has wounded you all deeply. I _am_ ashamed. But Eds isn’t, because he can drink their gigantic fuckin’ margaritas there. And you’d think Eddie a lightweight, right?” Richie grins. “And he _is!_ It’s the greatest thing, holy shit. He was drunk when he wrote this, actually!”

Richie waves the napkin in the air and then puts it carefully back into his pocket. What the audience doesn’t know is that it’s not the original. The original is kept safely between the pages of one of the notebooks Richie uses to write his jokes in, like a pressed flower. These others are copies because he went to a Chili’s and asked for a bunch of napkins and then Eddie dutifully wrote the same message on each of them so Richie could use it in this show.

(Richie insisted that Eddie’s hand would get a cramp and he could do it himself but Eddie replied that the audience would _know_ it wasn’t Eddie’s real handwriting and fuck it, he’d written the original and he was damn well going to write all the others too, and after about two hours of bickering Richie had conceded. He’d massaged Eddie’s throbbing hand afterwards, though.)

“So. The blowjob story. Eddie is a fucking neat freak and also nearly died when a house fell on him so it took us a while to get to the fun sexy part of our relationship, and also my being a paranoid closet case for forty years didn’t help. I was frantically calling my friend Bev and asking her for tips on how to like, do shit? For a guy? And she had a field day with that let me tell you. She told me the wackiest shit and I almost believed her on a lot of it. And then I remembered that hey! I’ve been given handjobs and stuff before so I know that can’t be true! She almost punked me!”

Richie gives the audience an accusing look, one hand on his hip in what is obviously an affected gesture. “You all want to know what she told me, don’t you?”

The audience cheers their approval. Richie rolls his eyes. “Okay, okay. She told me that if I dug my nail—and the men in the audience are already cringing! That’s a record.”

There’s laughter in the audience, mostly from the women.

“I think that gives you a good idea of the kind of advice she was giving. She also told me to go for deepthroating right away, I think she wanted to see if I would choke myself on my first go round like the idiot I am.

“But I’m getting off track here. Which really should be the title of my autobiography. And my sex tape. Eddie can attest to this.” Richie winks. “Getting distracted during sex, guys, it’s the new hot thing, try it, I guarantee your partner will get annoyed with you ten times faster than usual, and isn’t that what marriage is all about? Annoying your partner until they murder you for the insurance money?

“Seriously, though, so, Eddie’s finally cleared by the doctors to have sex, right? And we are both like fuck yes, because our teenage years of sexual exploration were cruelly denied us by the AIDS epidemic and small town bigotry, and I’m super excited, and then Eddie tells me we’re going to be doing the do in the _shower_.”

Richie looks down at his knees and bends them a few times to demonstrate, then looks back up at the audience with an expression of dismay. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed my age, guys, but if you’ll go onto Twitter you’ll see plenty of people commenting on how, y’know, I’m not exactly a spring chicken, and I definitely one hundred percent cannot lift Eddie up for long or be on my knees for long.

“But this is the love of my life, you know? So I want to try. I was like sure, Eds, you want us to have sex in the shower so that we don’t make a mess? We’ll have sex in the shower. Hell, we’ll have sex with hazmat suits on if you want. And guys. _Guys._ ” Richie shakes his head sadly and then admits, like it’s the worst secret in the world, “He got stuck.”

People are howling with laughter and Richie flips them all off. “Not _there,_ you perverts, on his _knees._ He couldn’t stand back up again! He was so angry, staring down at his knees all betrayed, and I hate to say it but I was laughing my ass off. All because the little shit is obsessed with being clean.

“So when I tell you that he yelled at me for not brushing my teeth? That’s romantic to me. Because to Eddie, it’s his way of taking care of me. Keeping me clean and healthy. That stuff is important to him. If he doesn’t care about you? Fuck, have all the cavities you want. But Eddie _cares about me._ ” Richie leans in. “Don’t tell anyone but I’m starting to suspect that’s why he married me.

“And guys, seriously, being married is the best. Sometimes people ask me if it gets boring, being with the same person all the time, and I’m like…” Richie does one of his voices, this one flat and monotone but in a way that’s distinctly hipster. “Oh, yeah, it’s _so_ annoying coming home every day to someone who loves you and shit.”

The audience laughs. Richie yawns, continuing the bit. “It’s just exhausting to have someone to talk to whenever you need. Someone who you know will stick around even after you have a fight. Someone you get a second chance with after those fights. Like damn. Really. Such an awful existence!”

He switches tracks immediately, suddenly, in the way that gives people whiplash when they’re not used to it. Richie bounces up and down on the balls of his feet. “But also! People take me seriously now that I’m a husband! Forty years I tried to get people to take me seriously by doing funny voices and talking about my dick and all I had to do was get married? Fuck, why did nobody warn me?”

Richie pauses, counts on his fingers. “Besides my mom, my dad, my manager, my college roommate’s girlfriend, my ghost writer, most of my comedian friends, all of my childhood friends…”

The audience laughs as Richie’s counting down ends with his middle finger, which he sticks out at them. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, fuzzballs. I’m the one who came out on top because now I get to stroll around and call this man my husband and people automatically assume I’m a Serious Adult.” The capitalization of those words is clear in Richie’s tone. “I’ll say, ‘uh, can I get a reservation for myself and my husband?’ and people actually give it to me! I’ll be in a meeting and say that oh yeah, my husband and I love baseball, and people sit up straighter! It’s amazing! It’s the secret Adult Club card I never knew I needed!

“Speaking of my comedian friends, actually…” Richie shakes his head. “Oh man. You all want wedding stories, I know. Well, Eddie and I had two weddings. Yeah! Most people don’t know that!”

The crowd’s cheering, probably because the idea of having two weddings sounds like a hysterical nightmare that they’re glad they didn’t have to plan.

“Yeah, we had our first one which was just the seven of us Losers.” Richie nods. “Our friend Mike officiated, it was really sweet. Totally spontaneous, too. We were all hanging out together the way we do and we were all a little tipsy and Eddie was singing _Let’s Hear it for the Boy_ with Bev, the two of them just rocking out, and I said, fuck it! Eds! Let’s get married right now! Why wait!

“And Eddie said, _what kind of idiot are you, fuck no we’re not getting married right now, we don’t even have an officiant._ And that’s when Mike told us he’s an ordained minister. Makes sense, actually, but anyway—honestly I wouldn’t be surprised about anything Mike can do, if it turns out he’s a spy for MI6 or an astronaut or whatever, fuck it, I’m not shocked, it’s Mike—we rounded ourselves up and we wandered around town until we found like this nice little park? And we got a bunch of shitty food from the local gas station and ate it as a picnic and Eddie and I said some really sappy shit to each other that Bill recorded because running a cult isn’t enough for the guy, he needs blackmail material on us too, and Mike declared us married. It was fantastic.”

The audience cheers again, this time out of what seems to be a genuine affection for the story, for the idea of a group of friends being tipsy, idiotic messes and having an impromptu wedding for their other friends.

“So that was our first wedding, where we did not get roasted at all. Or no more than usual. It was all very sweet. Our second wedding…” Richie shakes his head. “Eddie was a mess. Picture the most anal retentive wedding planner you possibly can, times it by ten, and you’ve got an idea of what we were dealing with. You’d think he was planning a royal wedding—actually hang on.”

Richie looks right into the camera. “Hey, Queen Lizzie, or whoever else is in charge, get Eddie to plan the next royal wedding. You won’t take a shit for six months out of sheer stress from him yelling but you’ll have the best and most well organized wedding you could ever possibly hope for.”

He looks back at the audience, grinning. “I loved every second of it. I had to do absolutely nothing other than give Eddie massages and taste-test cake.”

What Richie won’t tell them is that Eddie was so obsessive because he hadn’t been happy at his first wedding to Myra. That he hadn’t had a say in anything because Myra and his mother had taken it all over. But that sort of thing doesn’t make for a good joke, and it shouldn’t make for a good joke, anyway, because that kind of thing is for just between him and Eds.

“But we had to actually invite people to this wedding, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I know a lot of comedians. Like. A lot. And they had all been waiting for this day. The day they could finally roast me the way they’d always wanted.

“Picture it.” Richie spreads his hand out and sweeps it slowly across the audience like he’s Mufasa showing Simba how everything the light touches is their kingdom. “A sea of guests. Twenty-five percent of them are unwitting, innocent dupes. The other seventy-five percent… comedians just foaming at the mouth for the chance to go in for the kill.”

The audience roars with laughter at the visual that provides. Richie nods. “Uh-huh. Oh man. I knew it was what they wanted. I just knew it. We’d told each of the Losers they could make a speech at the wedding so we were braced for them to roast us, but what I didn’t know was that Eddie had given all of the comedians attending permission to roast me, because that’s the kind of thing Eddie considers an acceptable wedding present.”

Richie nods, grinning. “And the best part is? He was right! It was truly the best. I have never felt so loved in my life as I did when about a hundred people took turns telling me all the reasons I was a pain in the ass. My wedding video is the best, guys. I’d show it to you but it’s rather niche and this is _my_ show. If anyone’s going to be talking about what an annoying asshole I am, it’s me!”

There’s some applause and cheering scattered among the laughter in the audience.

“It was the perfect start to our married life, honestly.” Richie nods. “Truly. I mean how many people can say they were roasted by John Mulaney, Seth Myers, Ali Wong, _and_ Kate McKinnon? Besides Trump, I mean. And he's not a person, he's a science experiment on an orange that went horribly wrong.” The laughter here is predictable but genuine. “My poor dad, though. My mom quickly figured it out, I got my sense of humor from her, but my dad's this small town dentist who tried to give me the sex talk by comparing it to oral hygiene. He had no clue what was going on or why all these people were taking turns calling his son a deadbeat asshole in various creative ways. My friends all took pictures of his face, it was just so bamboozled.”

Richie imitates his dad's face. There's no way of telling if it's accurate or not, but the expression is comical, one of complete and utter confusion, and the audience laps it up.

Richie snaps out of it, grinning manically. “Eddie knows me so well, you guys, he knows my exact sense of humor. Who else would know that having a hundred of my colleagues roast me would be the perfect wedding present? Nobody, that’s who. But Eddie does. It's because he was a part of Bill's cult with me, too, he knows how that warped my perception of reality. Did you know what we did for Bill's birthday, actually?” Richie bounces again. “Okay, okay, so, it was Stan's idea, because Stan is my best friend and is a goddamn genius. And so we got a handheld camcorder, like we purposefully got an older camera, and we filmed ourselves talking about Bill like he'd been this big cult leader and we'd escaped from his clutches and were talking to some news reporter. We even got his wife to coach us on our acting. It was the best time, we had so much fun. And we spliced it together with old videos we got from our parents of when we were kids.

“And holy shit, Bill's face. We didn't know if he loved it or hated it until he started laughing so hard he was crying. Like, this is our friend group, guys. We waste weeks making a fake documentary about how one of us is a sinister cult leader and when we show it to the guy he thinks it's the funniest fucking thing. This is how fucked in the head we all are. And you guys love it? For some reason? We keep trending on Twitter every week, competing with those Critical Role assholes.”

Some people in the audience cheer and Richie wags a finger at them. “How dare you. How dare you clap for those people. They're loving and creative and wholesome as fuck and Taliesin Jaffe manages to be both queer and distinguished which I didn't think was legal, or even possible, and also I think he's like. Actually an eldritch being that crawled out from the space between dimensions so he terrifies me just a little bit. But here my friends are, just clogging up your Twitter feeds with our stupid in-jokes and insulting every single thing we say to each other, and then the Critical Role bunch are actually putting out content? Telling us all to love each other? What the fuck. They have to be stopped. We have to stop them before they finish taking over the internet. Especially because now Mike's trying to get us all to play Dungeons and Dragons and I just know I'm going to suck at it. And I would be a bard, for the record, yes, thanks for asking. I'll kick Sam Riegel's ass.” Richie pauses. “Actually he'll kick my ass. We all know it. I might be feral but I'm also lazy and I throw up at the sight of blood and Sam is literally a flesh-eating goblin so I'd be dead in seconds.”

There are clearly a lot of Critical Role fans in the audience, because they're doing a fuckton of cheering, whooping, and laughing.

“But anyway back to Eddie because he's like. Literally the most important person in my life and always has been. It’s so weird, being loved unconditionally by somebody who really knows you. I’m like… I don’t have to make jokes constantly to keep you around and earn your affection? What?” Richie squints suspiciously. “There’s _gotta_ be a catch, right? No? Really? You sure? Can I have that in writing?”

The crowd is laughing in empathy and understanding, and Richie gives them all a smile that clearly says _yeah you get me, we’re all self-loathing motherfuckers up here._

“Of course, I did have some doubts along the way,” Richie says, his voice dropping down and becoming serious. “I questioned myself at times. Like the day I found out Eddie’s a tenor. I hope you understand how bad that is for a theatre guy like me. There is no such thing as a functional tenor, guys. Just pick up any opera.”

Someone in the back shouts with incredulous shock, “You know opera!?”

“No!” Richie shoots back, sounding indignant, “but my friend Stan does so it’s the same thing!”

Everyone bursts out laughing.

“But yeah, no, in theatre, I was a theatre major, guys, tenors are the _worst._ The woooooooorst. Oh God. We hated ‘em. And my beloved Eds was a tenor!?” Richie stumbles back like he’s been slapped. “I had a full-blown identity crisis.”

There are clearly some theatre people in the audience, because they’re laughing the hardest.

“But in the end I decided to marry him because have you seen him? He's so cute, guys. He hates that I say it but it's true. And he still fits into the track pants that gave me fits when I was thirteen so that's great. I mean, how many of us get to live out our childhood fantasies? All right put your hands down, you're fucking depressing me, fuck you all for living your dreams. Ugh.” Richie looks like you couldn't pry the smile off his face with a crowbar.

“It’s so great, guys, though, it’s really so great being married. I get to wake up next to the love of my life every morning and I pinch him to make sure it's real and he smothers me with a pillow for only two minutes in revenge. Instead of y'know four minutes, which would kill me. Because Eddie's nice that way. I have someone who doesn’t let me poison myself accidentally when I cook, and he cares enough to yell at me for twenty minutes about not brushing my teeth—and then he’ll kiss me anyway, morning breath and all.”

The audience choruses _aww_ and Richie’s grin widens. “I think that’s a good note to end on, while you guys are cooing over how cute Eddie is and forgetting how annoying I am. I really don't need a third wedding with all of _you_ roasting me.”

The _aww_ s turn into laughter.

“Thank you all!” Richie waves. “And goodnight!”

The crowd, predictably, cheers.

**Author's Note:**

> In which I am Richie and yell all day and night about my friends roasting me but I secretly adore it because it's a sign of how well they know me.


End file.
